Yang Xu | 许扬 @yangxu.bsky.social

Nature Neuroscience A neural signature of adaptive mentalization nature.com/articles/s4159…

Interesting new paper narrowing the missing links between affective "empathy" and prosocial behavior by manipulating ACC‑projecting orexinergic circuits science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

That's cool: NeuroSTORM, a foundation model for human fMRI. Pretrained with 28.65 million fMRI frames (>9,000 hours) collected from over 50,000 subjects: arxiv.org/abs/2506.11167

The adaptive value of stubborn goals cell.com/trends/cogniti…

The adaptive value of stubborn goals Review by Eleanor Holton (@EleanorHolton1), Yael Niv (@yael_niv) & Jill X. O’Reilly tinyurl.com/2285d7f8

We are excited to share our latest work in @ScienceMagazine studying cooperative behavior in both biological and artificial intelligence systems — fantastic work by @JanineJiang22, Linfan Gu, and wonderful collaboration with @JonathanCKao! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

So excited and honored to receive an ERC Starting Grant for the project BrainAlign!! BrainAlign will bring LLMs closer to human understanding by directly aligning them with the human brain. Stay tuned for our findings, and multiple postdoc and PhD openings in the coming years!

Excited to share our new lab website! Konovalov Neuroeconomics Lab konelab.org Our research covers quite a few topics and methods across neuroeconomics, decision neuroscience, and behavioral economics:

My lab is seeking a highly motivated postdoctoral scholar to join our team at Stanford. If you are passionate about multimodal AI and neuroimaging, please reach out. #Postdoc #Hiring #AI #Neuroscience #Neuroimaging

The integrated control of decision and movement vigor Review by David Thura, Adrian Haith, Gerard Derosiere, & Julie Duque tinyurl.com/55etbzvm

🚨New preprint doi.org/10.31234/osf.i… with my stellar student @LuJunsong19474: A Small-World Mind Theory of social cognition Big network, close connection🤯Reconciling debates on low-vs high-dimensional mental representation Showing why naturalistic designs make a difference

Excited to share our new preprint! 🚨 Does human learning have an automatic aspect? Is it possible that we learn things that are counterproductive and only lead to reduced gains? We asked participants to choose cards to win rewards. Some cards had higher chances of winning than others, but the card locations on the screen were completely irrelevant. No matter how hard we tried, people still assigned value to locations. We gave them clear and vivid instructions. We quizzed them. We tested them across three sessions with 600 trials. And yet, they kept assigning value to the locations as if they mattered.

Rate and noise in human amygdala drive increased exploration in aversive learning | Nature nature.com/articles/s4158…

Asymmetric Social Representations in the Prefrontal Cortex for Cooperative Behavior biorxiv.org/content/10.110… #biorxiv_neursci

check out @RussinJake 's new paper on the interplay between in-context and in-weight learning in neural nets can explain tradeoffs in human learning pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.10…

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans. Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

Very glad to see our Review article out! It was a pleasure to collaborate with David Thura, Adrian Haith, and Julie Duque. Link: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Human newborns spontaneously attend to prosocial interactions rdcu.be/exy5L

Neurocomputational mechanisms of maladaptive behaviors in loneliness Review by Gabriele Bellucci, Hirotaka Imada (@Hiro_IMADA), Anne-Kathrin Fett (@AnneKathrinFett), & Ayahito Ito (@AyahitoIto) tinyurl.com/3n4p4aum

🚨OPPORTUNITY!!🚨 We're looking for enthusiastic students and postdocs to join our team. Connect with other trainees, contribute to the OHBM community, and support the next generation of researchers! Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI… Nominations close September 12, 2025.